Different nozzles

So i recently jumped into useing larger nozzles. And ive been printing ok.

My question here is, other than correctly setting it in the slicer, should the esteps be checked out with different nozzle sizes too?

I wouldn’t think, I mean, steps are usually checked at slow speed to remove any backpressure effects anyway. I guess one check to confirm if you’re feeling thorough

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Speed, Steps and flow rate!

For minor changes in nozzle diameter it’s not really noticable (i.e. 0.4mm → 0.6mm or 0.8mm), for the most part I would say your fine with just the basic Cura settings changes. I’ve used a 1mm nozzle with nothing but minor Cura changes and it’s worked great!

But if you want to print faster or if you want start using big diameter nozzles and keep speed up, you’ll have to check your speed and temps to make sure you hotend and extruder can melt plastic fast enough to keep up. I was eyeing a e3d volcano hotend as a upgrade for my bigger machine :eyes:

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Thanks for the input. I didnt really notice any over or under extruding, and this printer wont win any races yet. So my esteps should be good.

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I’m have using volcano on my B1 with 1.2mm nozzles and that might be it’s standard configuration from now on. it flies through filament but the prints are super fast comparatively. and the prints are stronger but obviously detail suffers I have another whole print head I cans swap in with .4, .6 and .2mm nozzles if needed and I always calibrate E-steps between them. This past summer i’ve printed about 80 lbs of filament with the 1.2 and no failed prints All PLA and ABS though I actually haven’t tried PETG just haven’t needed it yet.

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I’ve used up to 0.8mm nozzles with some success. While you can print bulky items quicker, it comes at the cost of detail. Also, you can’t really take full advantage of it unless you can also increase your heating rate. That becomes the next bottleneck.

Generally, increase your hot-end temperature by 5 to 10 (or even 20C) but be mindful not to overdo it if you have a print that involves a lot of movements without extruding. That is to say, prints where you have to jump from place-to-place, print a little bit, jump somewhere else and print a little bit, etc where you’re literally spending as much time or more in non-printing movements vs. printing movements. Think of the spires in something like a Walt Disney castle. You get the idea. That’s when heat creep at these elevated temperatures will bite you in the butt.

Esteps is irrelevant. It’s a measure of how many steps of rotation of the extruder motor are required to feed (say) 10cm of filament. It has nothing to do with nozzle size.

I had used a web-based guide that I can no longer find. I’m fairly sure it was from Prusa, however the one I can easily find again is this…

… but it doesn’t list the recommended settings as the original guide I used did. Matterhackers has a page that does, but I haven’t used it, so I can’t vouch for it.

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e-steps are important because you are feeding filament at a lot higher rate than you are with the tiny nozzles, could be I get more slippage in my extruder than some but there definitely needs to be a resetting of e-steps when I go to the 1.2mm or I get under extrusion.

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in theory if your extruder is calibrated properly for the 100mm test it should be irrelevant what nozzle you have it in. In your slicer you have to select your filament size and nozzle size. With those 2 pieces of information the slicer will decide how fast to extruder the filament in order to maintain the volume of filament that is required to complete your print.

I say this also knowing that once you make a major change in your machine you should verify your numbers but always remember, when you do the 100mm calibration test you are measuring filament before it enters the extruder, this does not change no matter what nozzle you have on the other end. You just have to adjust your speed to eliminate any skipping caused by the hot end not being able to melt the plastic fast enough.

The only major change you may have to make after changing your nozzle out is the speed of your print. If you are getting 80mm/sec from a stock hot end with a .4 nozzle. I can almost guarantee you will have to reduce that print speed if you up the nozzle size to a 1mm. This where upgrading your hot end will make a difference.

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I tried a 0.8 for a few months. I found exactly what Jason is saying I needed to reduce print speed. in my case it made a large slow printer slower and the 0.8 is quite crude. I ended up with a 0.6 I can print faster than the 0.8 because the clone volcano on the sidewinder is not very efficient.

The 0.6 I run a bit slower than I needed to with the 0.4. Typically I print at 0.4 layer height. I have a draft setting at 0.56 but I need to reduce the speed to do so. It ends up close to the 0.4 times.

I am looking at a faster printer.

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